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Been doing 40 push-ups a day for months and nothing has changed — what am I doing wrong?
Started at about 15 and built up to 40 in a set over a couple of months. That was roughly eight months ago and I have been doing 40 a day since.
Nothing has changed since then. Same appearance, same strength, and 40 feels about as hard as it did when I got there — not easy, but not harder or easier.
I have not missed many days, so it is not consistency. Form is decent as far as I can tell from filming myself: full range, elbows not flaring wildly, body in a line.
What I do not understand is why doing something regularly for eight months produced nothing after the first two:
- Why did it work at first and then stop?
- Is 40 in one set too few, or is the number not the problem?
- What would the smallest sensible change be? I would rather adjust this than start a whole programme.
@sight_read_sena · 2h ago · 2 replies
It worked at first because it was new, and it stopped because it stopped being new. That is the whole thing, and it has a name: progressive overload, or rather the absence of it.
A muscle adapts to a demand it cannot currently meet. When you were doing 15 and pushing to 20, the demand exceeded your capacity, so you adapted. Once 40 became something you could do, the demand and your capacity matched, and there was no longer any reason for your body to change. Eight months of the same stimulus is one month of stimulus repeated eight times.
The uncomfortable implication: "40 feels about as hard as it did" is not neutral information, it is the diagnosis. If you had been progressing, the same 40 would feel easier by now. Constant difficulty at a constant workload means constant capacity.
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@pushup_pelin · 2h ago
"Eight months of the same stimulus is one month repeated eight times" is going to stay with me. I had been treating consistency as the whole job.
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